Copyright owners and content creators, such as movie studios and production companies, have a need for protecting their investment, for example, movies, programming, services, software, or the like. Such content has typically found its way to the consumer through network broadcasts, premium programming cable or satellite channels, pay-per-view events, and retail sales and rentals of videocassettes.
Analog videocassette recorders (VCRs) allow consumers to view content at their convenience. Fortunately, such analog VCRs produce a reduction in quality of each generational recording that the second or third generation is usually unacceptable to most viewers. However, with digital technology, the intrinsic generational degradation characteristic of the analog technology no longer exists. The nature of digital storage and transmission allows endless generations of copies to be produced with the same quality as the original master. Today, most products that receive digital video services have only analog outputs. Future products with digital outputs will allow for the convenience of networked systems and higher quality recording. A home network, which receives content for display and storage, must now also protect content against illegal copying or distribution.
The Draft Video Home Recording Act of 1996 defines the Copy Generation Management System (CGMS) as a mechanism to manage the creation of copies, not the viewing of those copies. The rights of copyright owners do not map nicely into the concept of CGMS. Indeed, copyright owners have a greater interest in controlling the actual viewing of material as opposed to the copying of the material. Today, even using industry standard analog copy protection techniques, the emphasis is placed on the individual ability to view the copy. This is different from constraining the copying device from actually creating that copy.
These issues are exasperated due to the dramatic developments in digital media distribution such as the Internet. Therefore, there is a need to provide a secure solution for protecting the intellectual property of the copyright owners.